Wednesday, 18 January 2017

Bill Laswell Shares the Stories Behind Some of His Most Memorable Releases

With approximately 4,000 projects to his name since 1978, it’s fair to say that bassist-producer Bill Laswell
has been around a block or two in his day. As house producer for
Celluloid Records, he recombined New York’s rock, jazz, funk, reggae,
and hip-hop scenes in the ‘80s with inspired abandon. In 1983, he struck
gold with Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” which led to lucrative production
gigs for Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, Public Image Ltd., Motörhead, and Iggy Pop. In 1990, he bought Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn and launched his own label, Axiom,
which provided him with a home base for increasingly esoteric
experiments in improvised fusion as he began reaching out to the sounds
of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. At the same time, Laswell was
laying down the sonic groundwork for aggressively avant-garde outfits
like Last Exit, Praxis, and Painkiller while forging career-long relationships with looming figures like John Zorn and the late P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell.
Laswell’s currently moving forward with the combination musical collective and label Method of Defiance (M.O.D.), whose recent emergence on Bandcamp gives us the opportunity to check in on this free-ranging American original.

How’s Bandcamp working for you? What do you like about it?

We have two pages, one for my label and one for me. The albums on the
M.O.D. Technologies page are all fairly recent. My personal page mostly
contains out-of-print albums and a few newer releases. It’s like a
combination art gallery and storage room. It’s changed my mind about
alternate ways of releasing music. Now I can record something tonight,
edit it, balance it, create artwork, write a story, and tomorrow morning
someone could access it, listen to it, or buy it. While my past
experiences with digital releases and downloads were not positive, I can
now see exactly what was sold, how much it was sold for, and even where
it was sold. It’s a big difference from somebody telling you that your
digital sales aren’t worth mentioning.

Do you tweak the content in any way for the site?

We try to do new artwork, and sometimes we remaster. I have a lot of
live stuff from Japan and Morocco I need to go through and clean up,
edit, mix, and master.

What’s your focus as a player these days?

It’s intuitive. Lately, it’s not so much about systems and notes as
telling stories in a language you don’t even understand. I want to play
with people who are also able to tell stories musically. The music is
starting to be its own thing, and I’m just part of it. Like, this isn’t
me—this is the record I made, the music, the sound. And lately, the
sound has been mainly telling a story. I’ve had my own facility to work
in for the last 20 years. It’s a much different environment than these
spaceships in Manhattan where the assistant has an assistant, and
somebody’s getting the menus because lunch is coming up pretty quick.
They don’t do music. That’s something else. That’s why it takes so long
and costs so much. I drift toward expression. That may not be good for
your livelihood, but it’s good for you.

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